In the long and storied history of these forums, there have ideed been quite a few threads about this general topic. And one thing I noticed is the common problem advocates of skill-based MM want to solve : Games lost because of teammates playing badly. I have to admit, that this is perfectly understandable, because anyone who says, he's never felt any frustration with questionable teammates throwing perfectly winnable games, is a filthy liar .
But they are only seeing the, admittedly, really ovious half of the picture. The part they're missing is: How often is the enemy messing up hard? Most of the time it is hard to notice, since you usually don't have perfect information about the enemy positions and behaviour, but still you can safely assume that, over a large enough number of battles, you will be handed at least as many wins by bad enemies, than your bad allies will cost you. Unless you're a Sir Throwsalot yourself, it's a wash.
As was already mentioned, implementation of global skillbased MM is not at all trivial (or even possible) for a game of this scale, and even the best of systems will not change this one fundamental fact that already governs the outcome of games:
The better team is more likely to win.

Yeah, I can also remember the short range radar, but it also had an extremely strong (RN-like) heal. And while I'd love to see it as freeXP-ship, I doubt it will be, since it is tier X after all. More likely it will be a reward ship of some kind, maybe for 7 times rank 1?
And the non-BB free XP ship? I'm afraid it will be the Kronshtadt, it has the right tier and tecnically isn't a BB (cruiser icon and all), but boy, that "cruiser" has so many BB properties that it could almost be seen as trolling those who wantet a non-BB freeXP-ship. At least for me it is totally not what I was hoping for.

I cant comment on the quality of the implementation of the Runnig Lights mod, since I've never used it, but I can definitley imagine situations where it would be quite useful: When a target is almost nose in towards you, neither smoke nur torpedo indicator help you in determining it's direction of travel.

Of course noone's gonna claim that this mod gives you a huge advantage, but that doesn't mean it's perfectly fine. It might still give a small and situational advantage, and thats problematic, since it still is an advantage others do not have. And if you say "Its so minor it really makes no difference", then I have to ask: Why bother using it at all?

I witnessed the same thing on friday. A Chung Mu went into a cap and smoked up because he got spottet by an incoming air strike. Well the Lexington torped the smoke and he died. Poor guy went home with zero rewards, despite obviously not being AFK.
Sadly any form of automated AFK detection, that is not super easy to fool with rudimentary bot programs, is bound to produce false positives once in a while...

The problem with this campaign is that they tried to make the missions flavorful (mission 4: BB gunfight, Scharnhorst loses turrets; mission 5: Scharnhorst sunk by torpedoes; etc) and thereby ended up with an unbalanced mess of tasks, especially for the last two missions.

I really don't see the problem with these torps. The old 20km torpedos were bad against everything. You could get a few hits against BBs, maybe get a lucky hit on a cruiser once in a while, but you practically couldn't hit a DD, unless he has a major brain fart. With them beeing DW the chance to hit BBs is massively increased, while the chance to hit cruisers and destroyers is only slightly reduced (from slim to none). This would give those torps a niche as anti-BB weapon, while their previous niche was freeXP-sink. Also it seems they are now top mod instead of stock mod, and that alone would really be a great change.
The TRB option however would be quite stupid, if it is available for all torps. I suspect however, that it is tied to the DW torps, similar to some cruisers, which have the radar option only on their B-hulls. Shima would become the ultimate battleship killer, but be really bad at "normal DD stuff". I don't think it would be a great option outside of division play, similar to pan-asian radar.